Here & Now

A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with public radio stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it’s happening in the middle of the day, with timely, smart and in-depth news, interviews and conversation.

Co-hosted by award-winning journalists Robin Young and Jeremy Hobson, the show’s daily lineup includes interviews with NPR reporters, editors and bloggers, as well as leading newsmakers, innovators and artists from across the U.S. and around the globe.

John Singer Sargent painted “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit” more than 130 years ago, but his depiction of four little girls in white pinafores is still a favorite attraction at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

Yasiel Puig, a rookie baseball player for the Los Angeles Dodgers, has generated buzz and controversy as fans vote for the last players to be named to the MLB All-Star teams. The game is next Tuesday.

Puig, 22-year-old Cuban defector, has only played in the major leagues for a little over a month and has impressed people with his stats and athleticism.

However, some people think his short tenure with the Dodgers makes him undeserving of being an All-Star. The only way he can make the All-Star team is if baseball fans vote him in, and voting ends today at 4 p.m.

Miami may be closer to Cuba and home to more people of Cuban ancestry, but Tampa is ready to capitalize on economic and diplomatic ties to to the island nation once the longstanding trade embargo is lifted.

Tampa business owners are talking about how to expand into Cuba, and politicians are making trips there.

“In Tampa, they supported the revolution that freed Cuba from Spain. They supported the Castro revolution. They consider themselves a lifeline to Cuba,” Eric Barton of the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting told Here & Now.

According to a recent report by the United Nations, more than 45 million people worldwide were forced to flee their homes in 2012 — the highest number of refugees in nearly two decades.

People leave their homes for many reasons, including war and violence, environmental disaster and persecution. More than half of the refugees worldwide came from five countries, according to the UN: Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Sudan and Syria.

Within the local food movement, the community-supported agriculture (CSA) model is highly valued. You buy a share of a farmer’s produce up-front as a shareholder, then if all goes well, you reap the rewards at harvest time.

In the best selling books “Little Brother” and “Homeland,” Cory Doctorow uses his hero, teenage hacktivist Marcus Yallow, to get young people to think about privacy, civil liberties and the duties of the citizen in the age of the Internet.

Republican Mitch McConnell first won election to the Senate nearly 30 years ago, in 1984. This year he faces a Democrat who was born just a few years before McConnell took office, 34-year-old Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes.

After 77 years, a British man finally won Wimbledon. Andy Murray beat Novak Djokovic in three straight sets.

When it was over, Murray acted as if he couldn’t quite believe it, and most of Britain felt the same way.

Michael Goldfarb is a longtime public radio journalist who has been living in Britain for a third of that 77-year wait. Over the years, Goldfarb has vowed that he will leave Britain if a Brit ever won Wimbledon.

With much of the country under drought conditions and temperatures soaring in the rest of the country, what is a backyard gardener to do?

Ahmed Hassan is a professional landscaper and former host of Turf Wars and Yard Crashers on the DIY network and HGTV. Hassan told Here & Now that the most important things to think about when prepping your garden for drought are the type of plants you use and how you treat your soil.

The only Islamist group to join the military in deposing the elected government of Mohammed Morsi says it will withdraw its support for the transition plan in response to what it calls a “massacre” of pro-Morsi supporters.

Egypt’s state news agency says at least 51 civilians are dead and over 400 injured after the Egyptian army opened fire on hundreds of Islamists who had been holding a sit-in outside the offices of the Republican Guard in Cairo.

The protesters were demanding that the army reinstate Mohammed Morsi to the presidency.

Sybrina Fulton, the mother of slain teenager Trayvon Martin, testified this morning in the ongoing trial of George Zimmerman. Zimmerman is charged with second degree murder in Martin’s death. Martin’s parents have been in the court every day of the trial.

It seems like a simple question: how does the human brain change over the course of a year? It turns out, we know remarkably little about that. But one scientist at the University of Texas in Austin is trying to answer that question—and to do it, he’s had to take a pretty unusual approach — getting frequent MRI’s of his brain.

It’s down to the wire at Wimbledon, the men’s finals are on Sunday, the women’s on Saturday. And some of the biggest names will not be participating, because there have been a lot of upsets—Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova all lost in the early rounds. These upsets had linguist Ben Zimmer thinking about the use of the word “upset.”